On Oct 15, 2013, at 1:26 PM, Stephen Farrell <stephen.farr...@cs.tcd.ie> wrote:
> > Following up on my own point - not stylish but I think > in this case justified:-) > > On 10/15/2013 12:41 AM, Stephen Farrell wrote: >> I don't >> see why we shouldn't be equally comfortable in saying "don't >> send cleartext" - *if* that's an IETF consensus position - as >> we have seen sending cleartext is also just broken when one >> consideres pervasive monitoring. > > I guess this Washington Post story [1] that I saw this > morning would appear to provide a relevant example. > > In that case, I would argue that the fact that cleartext > IMAP provides interop and is successful does imply that > some services somewhere will use that for large populations > that will inevitably (as we now know) be subject to > pervasive monitoring. > > When the numbers involved ("500,000 buddylists and > inboxes" collected on a "representative day" for just > one agency) are at that scale, then it seems to me that > one can fairly describe that as a failure in protocol > design and not solely as a bad deployment choice. > > With the 20-20 hindsight afforded, if IMAP were a new > protocol, would we be correct to only have TLS as MTI as > we currently do [2] or would the Internet be better > if we *only* had port 993 and had TLS as MTU perhaps > with anon DH or something (*) like that? But with anon-DH you're not making those large populations less subject to pervasive monitoring. You've only made it a bit more difficult, and not in a way that is significant to the adversaries we're talking about. You would get them better security if they were doing TLS with mutual authentication, but that requires a lot of infrastructure, and you would hesitate to mandate that even if IMAP was a new protocol. You added "perhaps with anon DH" because you know what response you would get if you had said instead "with mutual authentication and PFS". Yoav _______________________________________________ perpass mailing list perpass@ietf.org https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/perpass